Robin Laws’ multi-award-winning Hillfolk is a great game in its own right, but its DramaSystem engine includes a toolkit for describing and dissecting characters that can be used in other games. One of these tools is the concept of dramatic poles. To quote Robin: “Driving any compelling dramatic character in any story form is an internal contradiction. The character […]
Category Archives: Hillfolk
In DramaSystem players both work together as co-authors to build a story, yet also compete as characters in pursuit of their unmet emotional needs. By requiring you to call scenes featuring other characters who don’t necessarily want to give you what you seek, it bends you toward conflict. But if you’re used to a more […]
Just as DramaSystem characters are torn between two dramatic poles, we as roleplayers may find ourselves torn between two roles: character and co-author. Certain games and play styles encourage us to think only of what our PCs would do. Some players who prefer this approach take a semantic leap overboard and declare any game where […]
The RPG Geek DramaSystem Contest 2015 by Yohann Delalande I only discovered Hillfolk a year ago. I was fortunate enough to experience a demo game run by Robin D. Laws himself at the Chimériades, a small French convention with a huge gaming-holiday feel. This experience turned into a real eye-opener. DramaSystem showed me how to […]
My booth pitch for Hillfolk describes its rules engine, DramaSystem, as emulating the structure of serialized cable TV shows. So let’s take an example heavily watched in geekland, “Game of Thrones.” Here’s a scene breakdown of the first episode of the fifth season with an eye toward identifying the petitioner and the granter and seeing […]
Redditors dig Hillfolk. Here’s what some say, cucumberkappa says, “I played a “season” and it was one of the most fun campaigns I ever had… I really felt like a cast member-and-writer of a drama series as I played.” “The finale was absolutely amazing. People held back all season and the finale became a madhouse of […]
Like most designers, when I get a stray idea for a game mechanic I try to exercise the discipline to make a note of it. Here’s where I can’t speak for other designers: I almost never use them, because they are misconceived by dint of their very nature as stray ideas. Mechanics for their own […]
A relatively new entry in scriptwriting jargon owes its secret origin to notoriously uncooperative movie star Bruce Willis. Kevin Smith recalls the moment, during their unfruitful collaboration on fore-doomed project Cop Out, when Willis started ripping out pages of dialogue he deemed irrelevant to the main action. This was chuffa, Willis said, and he wasn’t […]
a column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Looking for a new way to spark ideas for your next player character? Consider stealing a dramatic pole from classic literature. As Hillfolk players know, a dramatic pole is the essential opposition that defines a character tuned for, you guessed it, dramatic storytelling. It allows the character […]
DramaSystem Resources Articles The DramaSystem SRD – A reference document for writers and game designers to create their own products derived from DramaSystem Supporting Characters as Foils – Robin D. Laws uses GMCs to manipulate a PC’s dramatic poles The No-Response Response – Robin D. Laws on pacing scenes to maintain suspense Going Full Caliban – Robin D. Laws […]